~ Wallace's Attempt at Humanities

Monthly Archives: June 2013

. Saranna Thornton, Hampden-Sydney College professor, and co-author of the Annual American Association of University Professors faculty salary report, recently lamented the bleak outlook for college faculty pay, and tenure security.

Thornton decries the status of future higher education professorships – hounded with superficial “contingent” offers. In addition to discouraging doctoral candidates, this Economics professor hits a bull’s eye – with more than she envisions.

Relentlessly, higher education seems jettisoning toward MOOC land.

MOOC’s (“massive open online courses”) is a thriving technological approach – teasing and threatening traditional higher education tenets. College and University administrators gravely “saddle up”, addressing succinct challenges from open online courses. Should MOOC’s be revered or reviled?

Dr. Amy Gutmann, President, University of Pennsylvania, is bulking up about promoting MOOC’s. Appearing on C-Span, Gutmann labels them a “bold experiment”, declaring “2012 was the year of the MOOC.” She masterfully ties together MOOC’s brief five year history with recent faculty achievements of 10 new courses “on the platform”, for instruction.

Acknowledging baffling skepticism within academia, Gutmann peppered her audience by extolling Coursera, partnering with 33 top universities in the world – offering online courses. Additionally citing edX – these non profit operations will hone in online courses designated for dozens of colleges, universities.

MOOC student numbers astonish – in the 100’s of thousands. Liberty University’s recent news release brags “eighty percent of the school’s more than 15,000 graduates were online students.” This technology offers streaming of lectures, papers, notes on a global system of interconnected computer network. Proponents assure the average student will “gain a near-universal access” to high level teaching – with minimal cost.

Between residential (read “elite”) education of selective schools, with history of applicant rejection…and the populist formula of educating those community college students, or other “nonselective” regional schools, the struggle convenes. Triggering a tradition of “selected” classroom opportunities versus “virtual education” for millions continues to provoke. Ballooning tuition fees add to the fracas.

Some quarters claim advanced technology will stoke a democratization of accessibility to higher education; many educators theorize it’s sadly overdue. Sardonically, academic traditionalists are unconvinced with this techy reach threatening eleven centuries of solid education. Amherst College faculty roils, voting over 60% against joining edX, an organized confederation of courses funded by Harvard and M.I.T. How does one foster meaningful discourse in a “classroom” of ten thousand students, or grade their work?

“LAPTOP U”, Nathan Heller’s piece in The New Yorker (05/20/13),lays out what future online classrooms could dismantle. Heller warns course assessment techniques must be carefully designed; students would receive rigorous evaluations. “I’m concerned about electronic approaches to grading writing. I think they are ill-equipped to consider irony, elegance, and…I don’t know how you get a computer to decide if there’s something there it hasn’t been programmed to see.”, said Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard president, in The New Yorker piece.

Student access to “elite education” could be less about a professor’s classroom than his/her access to “elite” social circles. Heller observes Bill Clinton, a lower-middle class kid out of the Ozarks, might have received high level preparation without going to Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale; yet, he wouldn’t have enjoyed access to the U.S. Presidency.

Still…it’s about the student, isn’t it?

The late Dr. Allan Bloom, University of Chicago, worried over students developing “souls without longing” – their developed absence of care, called indifference…or as David Brooks, NYT columnist, recently speculated in his The Way to Produce a Person, “We don’t merely want to know if they have done good. We want to know if they are good.” How will MOOC’s contribute to that end? Can they?

Saranna Thornton, H-SC professor, internalizes: “I so loved teaching then….but if I was in that position now, I would not have gone into the profession.” While sympathizing, can we culturally afford such deficit? Traditional teaching may not be there for those so inclined….to the detriment of all.

The human soul – does God speak to us in the “silence within us”? Is this place responsible for a growing humanity or enhancing a person’s spirituality?

Inhaling sorrowfully, one realizes disparate groups assess the soul as culturally counterintuitive – distant from the spiritual realm. For some, the Soul’s a small KIA vehicle with snappy slogan, “build your own Soul.” Soul food relates to African American Southern cuisine. Soul music, of the 1950’s, combines elements of African American gospel with rhythm and blues – remember Jackie Gleason’s character, Poor Soul, or TV’s Soul Train?….we can go on.

Martha Curry, friend, fellow Morning Prayer parishioner, led me to Parker J. Palmer, author of The Courage to Teach, Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. The text generates introduction toward heightened sensitivity to a human center – an unsettling, powerful soul. Palmer wrote: “The soul is like a wild animal…the soul is tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, and self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places.”

While elementary Sunday school instruction persuades all humans possess a soul, I didn’t associate its presence with growing spiritual maturity. This inner “something” began to shape en parte by confronting life’s experiences – often vigorously inflicted.

Honorable William C. Mims, Justice of the Supreme Court of Virginia, in a recent Faith & Values column, wrote about “friend”, Henri Nouwen, of Yale Divinity School. Nouwen, a comfortably established professor, abandoned his accomplished perch “to provide menial service to profoundly disabled adults.” Writing his column, Mims was deeply touched – as were his readers. An example of soul at work?

Recently, 10th District Congressman, Frank Wolf, wrote, Prisoner of Conscience, reflecting Wolf’s religious commitment to human rights. Reviewers observed that Congressman Wolf combined committed public service with the applications of “feed my sheep” and deeper “love thy neighbor.” His thesis: world revolutionary changes could be brought by an authentic pursuit of justice – urged on by being “a prisoner of one’s conscience”. Soul induced?

Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul, originally published in 1992, speculated what a major narrowing of our soul’s capacity might be. He observed an unwelcomed challenge from modern behavioral psychology. That discipline strongly dismisses the soul’s existence….believing instead a person’s action is the ultimate key to accurate understanding. This personal human action might be a calibration into “cure” for atypical behavior.

Moore holds that dismissal of soul leads professional therapy astray. Instead, by substantively peering inward (soul), one can discover acceptance – a coping with life’s disenchantment. Summoning his right brain sensitivities, the author instructs our soul is partly on earth, partly in eternity. He writes: “Disappointments in love, even betrayals and loss, serve the soul at the very moment when life wallows in tragedy. The soul is partly in time, partly in eternity. We might remember the part that resides in eternity – when we feel despair over the part that is in life.”

Remember, the soul detects how to survive in hard places – it is developed, strengthened – as we develop and strengthen. It withers into atrophy on inaction. For me, soul is a spiritual repository of those provocative values lessons – even when our frenzied behavior needs re-fueling; it becomes the go-to source.

Overtly, soul (psuche) can be authenticated with boldness, courage – bringing gentle behavior while lunging toward a “good”. Its enhancement heightens a growing sanctity for spiritual thought. Too frequently, our soul spends valuable time trying to catch up to us. “I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive – even when the rest of me wanted to die. That something was my tough and tenacious soul”, concluded Dr. Parker Palmer. He wrote this as a victim of his depression, or “deadly darkness.”

Martha Curry, dear friend, presided over Morning Prayer service recently, leading in psalm, “for God alone my soul in silence waits.” She really put me on to something here….for all of us.

Raymond B. Wallace, Jr. is a former business executive, Advance Placement classroom teacher, Trustee for Virginia Retirement System. He can be reached at rbwallace01@verizon.net.

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